The European Union’s position on tackling climate change was that all new public buildings needed to be carbon neutral by 2018 and all new buildings by 2020. So, I’d be grateful if the Cabinet Secretary, in her response, can clarify what the position is, because we are still members of the European Union and we are obliged to comply with its regulations. I think it’s really important to recall that the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015 obliges all 46 public bodies to address sustainability, and not put at risk the well-being of future generations. So, I commend many of the points raised by David Melding—very difficult to disagree with him on this subject—although I won’t, sadly, be voting with his amendments.

I wanted to use this opportunity to praise the role of wood, the substance, that it can make for Wales to meet its public sector carbon neutral target by 2030. Because the public sector has a huge role to play in showing the private sector the way towards a low-carbon economy, when we currently have the dominant private house builders so resistant to change and continuing to use ways of building that are not in any way properly addressing energy efficiency. It seems to me that using wood in the construction industry, particularly for buildings, is a way of using Wales’s unique selling point as a country well-endowed with land, as well as land that is suitable for cultivating wood. It’s interesting to note that the wood-based businesses are the fifth largest industrial sector in the UK. So, this is a very large contributor to the economy, and timber construction can change the face of sustainable development. But it’s sad that only 15 per cent of the timber we use in construction at the moment is grown in the UK, and the UK is the third largest importer of wood in the world.

Timber housing in Wales is currently less than 25 per cent of all new builds. In Scotland, by contrast, timber frame accounts for over 75 per cent of the new-build market. We urgently need to grow more trees and that is obviously not a quick fix. That takes between 25 years and 40 years in order to be able to harvest. But we also need to build many more houses in order to meet the needs of our population, including council housing and other social housing. The most efficient, low-carbon and high-performance housing throughout the world is based on wood. So, in the past, there was no reason to challenge the role of steel and concrete in construction, but climate change changes that as everything else. People like Michael Green, a Canadian architect, urges us to swap steel and concrete for timber in a book he published in 2012. Steel and concrete are

‘wonderful materials…but…they are hugely energy demanding to produce and have significant carbon footprints’, he said.

‘Climate change and the need for more urban housing collide in a crisis that demands building solutions with low energy and low carbon footprints’.

‘As a renewable material grown by the power of the sun, wood offers us a new way to think about our future. To do so means reinventing wood; making it stronger, more firesafe, more durable and sourced from sustainably managed forests.’

And it’s not just Green who’s arguing that case. Professor Callum Hill, who’s a materials expert at Edinburgh Napier University, points out that timber products lock up more carbon than is used in their production. They decrease carbon dioxide in the atmosphere both by reducing emissions and removing carbon dioxide and storing it. Wood has that unique ability. I commend the action of Powys County Council in adopting a wood-first policy, which is the first local authority in Wales to do that. We can see from what has happened in Hackney in London, which is obviously a local authority with almost no land, and which adopted a wood-first policy several years ago and has won many, many awards for the quality of its housing, schools and public buildings. This is a way in which I feel we ought to be going in Wales. I’d be interested to know whether the Cabinet Secretary has thought about that.